Mad as Hell: The Making of Network and the Fateful Vision of the Angriest Man in Movies

by Dave Itzkoff

  By now, Cronkite had reconciled herself to the possibility that her being cast in Network had less to do with any particular acting talent than the lifelong friendship between Lumet and her father. Still, the role epitomized a personal struggle that she had been waging, at least since she had moved to Los Angeles to pursue an acting career, to establish an identity that was separate from her father’s name; that struggle was now reignited as she found herself once again living under her parents’ roof while she worked on the film. “It was a time of my life when there was so much challenge to my individuality from Dad,” Cronkite said. “Just going out to L.A., it was hard to be my own person, with everybody assuming that every part I got was because of Dad.”

  It did not help matters that the fictional circumstances of Mary Ann Gifford so closely resembled events in the life of Patty Hearst, offering Cronkite an unpleasant reminder that her own connections to wealth, fame, power, and the platform of the media put her at risk, too. “I had friends joking about kidnapping me, and it was so not funny, and scary,” she said. “Because Patty Hearst got kidnapped, I could be kidnapped. These were slightly unsavory friends, and I think the reason it was so scary was that I didn’t really know how much they were kidding.”

  Cronkite’s big moment at the farmhouse occurred as the radicals and the agents were battling over the contractual details of The Mao Tse Tung Hour, during which Gifford was to come charging down a rickety flight of stairs, bellowing about the value of her contribution to the show. Her line, as given in the screenplay, is “Fugginfascist! Have you seen the movies we took at the San Marino jail break-out demonstrating the rising up of a seminal prisoner-class infrastructure?!”

  Like so many of her costars before her, Cronkite found it trying to say even this much. “I’m coming down the stairs screaming this line of propaganda that was so rich in politics and so convoluted, and not that accessible to me,” she recalled. “This is not something that I identify with or empathize with. Particularly when I’m coming in with that passion. All I really want to say is, ‘F you, F you!’ I don’t want to be spouting multisyllabic propaganda. And it was very difficult to get the words out.”

  Where the youthful and inexperienced actress differed from nearly everyone else was in boldly asking Chayefsky if her line could be altered to something more manageable. “I remember saying to Paddy, ‘Look, can we just say this instead?’” she said, laughing at the memory of her innocent blunder, adding that she will be haunted “for the rest of my life—‘How dare you, how dare you turn to Paddy Chayefsky and ask him to dumb down one of his lines?’ It’s just astonishing to me. My face is red as I’m even thinking it. It’s just astonishing that I would have the gall to do something like that. And naïveté. It didn’t occur to me that that wasn’t done, you know?”

  Not that Chayefsky was offended by her request. “Oh, he was lovely, he and Sidney both,” said Cronkite. “They just said, ‘Well, no.’ But they didn’t make me feel dumb or embarrassed or out of line. They just basically said, ‘Well, let’s try it again the way it is.’ Sidney had an amazing way of saying, ‘You screwed up,’ so that you felt you were the greatest thing in the world. He had this amazing way of saying, ‘Oh my God, that was fabulous. How about if we try it again, and just tweak it a little?’”

  A few days earlier, Marlene Warfield had filmed a scene with Dunaway where their characters were introduced to each other at what was supposed to be a UBS network conference room in Los Angeles (actually an office building in Melville, Long Island): Diana Christensen announced herself as “a racist lackey of the imperialist ruling circles,” and Laureen Hobbs identified in kind as “a bad-ass Commie nigger.” For Warfield, who had already played numerous roles in Manhattan theater, on Broadway, on television, and in film, this language was blunt but hardly bothersome to her.

  “It tasted very good,” Warfield later said of the line. “And it was satirical. But there’s a lot of facts, there’s a lot of truth to it. It’s throwing it back in the faces of people who looked down on it, and who misunderstood what it really meant.” In appropriating this racial slur, Warfield said Chayefsky and Lumet “didn’t mean to harm anyone. They just wanted to show the hypocrisy of the way people interpret things, when they hear something that they know is true.”

  Lumet, in particular, helped Warfield understand this exchange in a way that Chayefsky probably never could have. Lumet told Warfield to think about it as similar to The Blacks, an avant-garde satire by Jean Genet whose traditionally all-black cast of characters includes a royal court and a queen dressed in white masks or whiteface makeup. Recalling the director’s instructions to her, Warfield said, “‘You are the black queen, and there is the white queen.’ He hit it, man, he hit it right on the button when he said that’s what this is about. And from then on, we did the scene. That’s all he had to say. Whoa!”

  It was never clear to Warfield whether Lumet knew she was one of the actors who had performed in The Blacks during an East Village run in the 1960s. “I’m saying, ‘Damn, did you see me in that, too?’” she said. “I guess he did. It was on my résumé. But that was a stroke of genius, to cough that up.”

  But not all her costars at the farmhouse felt the same way. At the bottom of its staircase, seated against decrepit curtains and decaying window blinds and surrounded by a phalanx of actors playing agents, managers, and lawyers, was Burghardt, in sunglasses and his ceremonial military dress, a prop pistol concealed at his side. To him, the decision to play the Great Ahmed Kahn was a perilous bargain that had to be weighed against the political battle for which he had sacrificed much of his adult life.

  Only two years earlier, on February 15, 1974, at the age of twenty-six, Burghardt—then known as Arthur Banks—had been released from a federal penitentiary in Sandstone, Minnesota, after serving almost twenty-eight months of a five-year sentence for draft evasion. This was the third such institution where he had been incarcerated after his conviction, having started his term in 1971 at a medium-security prison in Danbury, Connecticut. The next year, he was transferred to a maximum-security prison in Terre Haute, Indiana, where he was involved in a peaceful protest for which he was sprayed with mace and brutalized in his cell, then placed in solitary confinement for the next fifteen months. In December 1972 he was charged with having assaulted an officer during the protest, and an Indiana judge ruled that his lawyer, William Kunstler, could not represent him in the case because of public statements of support Kunstler had made that violated court rules. The U.S. Supreme Court was about to review the case when the actor was released on a $10,000 bond.

  When Burghardt read the role of the Great Ahmed Kahn in Chayefsky’s screenplay, he saw the character as “a tyrant, a punk, a criminal”—and a cartoonish reduction of a far more complicated political spectrum that he knew firsthand. “I knew that black people were far more relevant to the world, and there were more important black leaders than these cowards, punks, and petty dictators who emerged out of the back eddies of the civil rights movement,” Burghardt said.

  But the larger message of Network—about a man who is severely punished for enunciating some necessary and uncomfortable truths—was one that the actor could not walk away from. “I realized that this was a black comedy,” he said, “and I had to be part of it.” The question, Burghardt said with a sardonic laugh, was whether his own community would punish him for accepting a part he knew to be a caricature—“whether or not I was going to be considered a traitor.”

  If his character had to be an archetype, Burghardt said, “I decided I’d play the archetype to the hilt.” Earlier that day at the farmhouse, he had filmed a scene with Cronkite and Warfield in which Kahn is surprised by the news that his group is being considered for a television show. By his own decision, Burghardt said, “I wanted my mouth to be filled with fried chicken and shit. There had been a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken there. And in one take, I said, ‘What the fuck are you talking about?’ And some chicken came out and it got Kathy on the sid
e of the head. Lumet said he liked it. I was very embarrassed. I said, ‘Tell you what, we’re getting low on fried chicken. Give me some toilet paper and I’ll stuff my jaw full of toilet paper.’ I smeared some of the chicken grease over my mouth.”

  When it came time for him, as Kahn, to interrupt the bickering of the Hollywood power brokers and chic radicals by firing his gun into the air and announcing, “Man, give her the fucking overhead clause,” Burghardt said, “I realized I had to go deep inside of me to be somebody that I did not want to be, whom I actually loathed inside. Yes, there was a part of me that didn’t want to do this. There was another major part of me that realized that I had to do it, and I had to tell myself, literally, shut up. Be in the moment.”

  “All I had to do was sit there and not bemoan the loss of my vaunted, wonderful career in doing this,” Burghardt said, fully expecting that there would be future consequences for the choice he had made. “‘Oh, yeah,’ I thought, ‘I’ll probably never work again. A lot of black people won’t like me doing this role. People on television won’t want me in television.’”

  * * *

  The festive assignment on St. Patrick’s Day, March 17, was to caravan out of the city to the Sea Spray Inn, a small hotel and a cluster of cottages on Ocean Avenue in East Hampton. There, Holden and Dunaway shot most of the scenes that occur during Max and Diana’s Long Island getaway: their frolicking on the beach, their secluded dinner at an Italian restaurant, their tense, excited moments as they enter the motel room where the principal activity of the evening is about to occur. But once the actors passed through the door to their boudoir, their work was done: all their most intimate activities had already been filmed the previous day.

  As part of the arrangement to pacify the recalcitrant Dunaway, the interior of the bedroom at the Sea Spray Inn was re-created in a small studio on West Forty-Eighth Street in Manhattan, where only essential personnel were allowed. Despite the semi-seclusion these accommodations offered her, Dunaway remained nervous about the sequence. “I’m never at ease in love scenes, and actually feel quite shy about them,” she said. “But this was a scene I was terrified to do. It seemed so outrageous, and I felt foolish astride Bill and babbling away about ratings in between gasps. It is one thing when the camera is shooting two people in bed, mostly hidden by sheets and blankets, with a shoulder exposed here, a leg there. It is quite another when you know that the camera is spending a lot of time shooting close-ups of your face as you try to enact this incredibly intimate moment.”

  In a further measure of consideration, Lumet spoke with Dunaway in advance and, without mincing words, described exactly how he planned to shoot the scene. “We would open with a high shot of the two in bed, then the camera would dolly in behind her,” he said. “I assured her that the bedsheet would be high enough that we would see no crack of the ass. As we moved in closer, her arm would be at such an angle it would cover her breast. And during filming we stuck to that agreement. I would not violate it, because among other things, Faye had to play the scene. It wouldn’t have been good, much less funny, if there was so much tension she couldn’t act.”

  The official filming log from that day is consistent with the pre-shoot strategy Lumet laid out. The scene begins with a wide shot of Max and Diana, the camera dollying in as they kiss and she removes her boots. In a second shot, they remove their shirts, and Diana is fleetingly seen topless before she dives underneath the bedsheets. In the third shot, Diana lifts up the sheet to allow Max into the bed, and in the fourth she has her orgasm, “screams climactically and collapses,” according to the shooting script. The last remaining shot is a close-up of Diana in climax; the accompanying notes say she was either “clean” or “clear” as she “drops down out of frame.” “For all the Sturm und Drang that went on about it,” said Philip Rosenberg, one of the few crew members permitted on the closed set, “it was a very uneventful shoot that day. It was all very controlled and very quick.”

  As Dunaway later recalled the experience, the key ingredient that allowed her and Holden to complete the sequence was “a huge measure of good humor.” “Bill could not make it through a scene without dissolving into laughter at some point along the way,” she said. “And Lumet was great, he just went zooming about on his invisible roller skates as if this scene was like all the others.”

  Without quite revealing what had transpired off camera, Lumet would later say that his sympathies during the love scene were with Holden, who in this circumstance was “an actor being used.” “To be one of the biggest stars, and let the other person have all of the fun, the whole speech, and you have to lie there, faking that you’re pumping into her, and not allowed any reaction that’s going to interfere with the comedy”—to put up with all that, Lumet said, was “noble of him.”

  One more step remained before this material could be used in the film. Under her agreement to perform the love scene, Dunaway was also permitted to join Lumet, Chayefsky, Gottfried, and their editor, Alan Heim, when they watched the raw footage from the shoot, and accounts vary as to how she reacted when the day’s results were presented to her at Heim’s editing suite. According to Gottfried, the actress was unimpressed with what she saw and, after having fought so vigorously to keep herself covered up on-screen, looked at the takes and said, “You could have shown a little more.” “She complained because they were so unsexy,” Gottfried said. “That’s the funny thing about her. I mean, really.”

  Heim had a different recollection of how the review with Dunaway proceeded. Far from responding with apathy and nonchalance, Heim said, the actress noticed that in one of the takes her nipples were briefly but clearly visible at the bottom of the frame—a direct violation of the written agreement between her and Gottfried—and she exploded in anger at the men, who outnumbered her in the room, demanding to know what had happened.

  As Heim hurriedly explained to Dunaway, her inadvertent exposure was the accidental result of how the scene had been shot and how the footage was being played back to her, but this mistake would not show up in the completed film. When Dunaway was performing the love scene, Heim said, “She was wearing a sheet for the most part. Sometimes, though, when she moved, the sheet would expose a little bit of her nipple. When we screened that scene for Faye—and they screened it in the screening room, and unfortunately the projectionist put in the mask that was not the proper mask for the film. With that mask in the way it was, you could see a little bit of her nipples. She was furious. And I had to reassure her—we all did—that this was an anomaly. It’s on the film frame, it was never intended to be, and if you look at it in the movie, it’s not there. When it’s projected properly, you don’t see it. Sidney would not have done that; it’s not his kind of prurience.”

  Even so, Heim and his cohorts could not understand what all the fuss was about. “She did have to be seminude in that scene, otherwise it wouldn’t have played,” he said. “I hate love scenes where women are wearing bras and men are wearing shorts. Give me a break.”

  With this hurdle cleared, only two days of filming with the principal cast remained, all minor scenes set within the UBS offices. On Sunday, March 21, the cast and crew gathered at Sardi’s to celebrate the completion of their work—and the fact that Lumet had finished a week ahead of schedule, at a savings of $400,000—and to bid one another farewell. The party was formally hosted by Gottfried and Chayefsky, who were both in attendance, as were William Holden, Sidney and Gail Lumet, and Peter and Eletha Finch. As parting gifts, Kay Chapin, the script supervisor, received a lion’s tooth from Holden and a Gucci checkbook wallet from Finch. Marlene Warfield, who had been too shy throughout filming to engage her more illustrious colleagues, finally found the courage to approach Chayefsky at his table and ask him for his secrets to being a successful writer.

  “You have to be disciplined,” he told her. “You have to get up early in the morning, every morning, and just sit in front of the page until something comes out. Write one word, if that’s all you can do in one day
. And just keep doing it until things start pouring out.”

  But not everyone was in such a generous mood, and amid the array of festive celebrity caricatures that decorated the walls of Sardi’s, one famous face was noticeably absent from the gathering of partygoers. As New York Post columnist Earl Wilson described the occasion, “Faye Dunaway ducked the ‘wrap-up’ party of the film Network at Sardi’s and the others were a little hurt.”

  * * *

  Even after good-byes had been said by those who wished to exchange them, one substantial portion of the film remained: the crescendo of impressionable television viewers running to their windows, at Howard Beale’s urging, to stick their heads out and yell that they, too, were mad as hell and not going to take this anymore. As Chayefsky’s screenplay had described this impromptu “Nuremberg rally,” the scene was to unfold on a stormy evening starting at the apartment of the Schumachers, as their daughter, Caroline, looks out onto “the rain-swept streets of the Upper East Side, the bulking, anonymous apartment houses and occasional brownstones.” Max then joins his daughter to gaze upon “the erratic landscape of Manhattan,” seeing “silhouetted HEADS in windows—here, there, and then out of nowhere everywhere, SHOUTING out into the slashing black RAIN.” There would be “a terrifying THUNDERCLAP, followed by a FULGURATION of LIGHTNING” that “punctuates the gathering CHORUS coming from the huddled, black border of the city’s SCREAMING people, an indistinguishable tidal roar of human RAGE.”